


Fly

by karanguni



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Chocobos, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:40:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23226451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: The academy is like nothing you've ever known. Everyone in it is rich or knows rich people: they have patrons, or loaded parents who live on the top of the Plate in Midgar, a city that looks like something out of either a book or a nightmare.What horrifies you the most is how they don't know birds.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 16
Collections: Worldbuilding Exchange 2020





	Fly

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ZScalantian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZScalantian/gifts).



You start at the library, because you don't actually know where else to start to find out what to do with your future. You only know this: that you'd seen the Golden Saucer Stakes broadcast on your family's television set, and – for the first time in your short life here in Mideel – chocobo had seemed _glamorous._

The Stakes had been held in a stadium large enough to seat more people than live in your entire town. There had been private boxes stuffed full of celebrities; row after row of cheering no-name fans; flashes from hundreds of cameras. There had been the roar of the crowd, and the rising timbre of the announcers' voices, and the euphoric, fist-pumping moment of victory for the first across the line, the rider standing in his saddle as his bird tore up sand streaking by.

There had been something else, too, on top of the glitz and the lights and and the eye-watering amount of gil in the prize pool. There had been, for you, a glimpse of a life you could live off of this island.

So you start at the library because the chocobo you'd seen on screen had been nothing like the ones you know. The chocobo _you_ know are devilish pests, annoying pets, and normal everyday transport. There are the wild birds that cluck at you when you walk along the edge of the town; the white ones that people somehow think make good companions; the old stable-birds that are more reliable than vehicles on Mideel terrain.

You've lived around chocobo all sixteen years of your life – so have all of the few friends your age, and everyone else who's born-and-bred Mideel. They've been part of life on the island since time immemorial, and it almost surprises you that the birds from the Golden Saucer had looked so... grand. You aren't used to thinking of chocobo as _grand_.

It's at the library that you learn that chocobo, in other places, are not just born: they're _bred_. To the north (though what _isn't_ north, for island folk?), there are whole chocobo farms dedicated to pedigreed birds. _Racing birds._ Birds aren't just yellow or white: they come in green, and blue, and black, and gold. Families – _generations_ of families – spend their entire lives learning how to breed the best of the best. There are whole books on chocobo genetics, the effects of feed and training and socialisation: the list goes on and on. But what stands out to you is that one thing keeps coming up in this mass of _literature_ : it isn't simply breeding that makes a chocobo race well, it is also the bond between it and its jockey.

Jockeys, as you find out, become _legends_. There are fanpages dedicated to them and every move they make. People interested in racing have whole databases on every race in a jockey's history: from humble starts in training academies all the way to the Continental Cups. People post photographs and vital statistics and gossip about spotting this jockey in Midgar or that jockey in Wutai; who they're going out with and how they spend their prize gil.

So you decide you want to be a jockey.

This, as it turns out, is not as easy as you think it should be. Chocobo riding academies exist, but not in Mideel. In Mideel, riding a chocobo is something your parents teach you when you get tall enough to mount up.

You could start to learn to race, but you'd have to leave home eventually to get _good_. The academies are expensive, and located in places where the rich can send their children or their chosen jockeys to train. Someone like you would have to work for your keep: be a stablehand in exchange for a chance to ride the birds, hoping to get good enough that one day you get noticed.

You think of the alternative, which is spending the rest of your life as a hot springs attendant if you don't get out of here. You're not good at school, and you don't want to be a SOLDIER for Shinra, but you _are_ good at keeping the wild chocobo from bullying you and the domestic ones from throwing you off their backs. You could, you think, _be good at this._

You help out on the local ranches after that. You ride chocobo whenever you have free time, taking the local stable birds out on long stretches to help them get some wind in their headfeathers. You learn how nearly all of them have their own clucks and chirrs, their own quirks and habits. You feed them greens and nuts and change their tack and muck their stalls and you learn to love them for more than how they're the way you're going to get out of your small cow-town.

So when you turn eighteen, you hug your parents goodbye with a letter of acceptance from a racing academy near Midgar – not the best like the ones near the Saucer, but far from the worst – and you go off with not much more than a small suitcase and your dreams.

The academy is like nothing you've ever known. Everyone in it is rich or knows rich people: they have _patrons_ , or loaded parents who live on the top of the Plate in Midgar, a city that looks like something out of either a book or a nightmare.

What horrifies you the most is how they don't know birds.

They know more _about_ birds than you think you ever will. They're like the books you read when you were younger come to life: genetics, breeding, training. Every last person in the academy, from the stablehands and grooms to the jockey apprentices and riders to the bloodstock agents and stable managers: they all care about just one thing – results. Not the birds, but the _results_.

It makes sense, you're aware; people don't get to stand on the podium by being sentimental about a slow bird. But as you spend a year working your way up from the bottom, you can't help but feel that the academy is just a business with no soul. It hasn't produced any of the winning racers or winningest jockeys: both the birds and the riders that come from this academy tend to top out at the high-middle tier of the tables.

Midgar, you think, has money but not much else. They don't know how to whisper to birds, to teach them to _want_ to fly. A chocobo can have the lightest bones, the brightest eyes, and the strongest legs – but none of it will matter if she doesn't want to _go_.

When you finally get to ride a bird for a demonstration to the rich patrons who hire jockeys to win them trophies on chocobo that they've never so much as patted once in person, you mount up and think: _I'm going to show them what an island boy can do._

You lean into your bird as you line up at the start line. To your left and right are riders who have had, all their lives, the best tack and the best facilities and the best trainers. But you've spent the last two and a half years learning every bird in the stables by their name, by their voice, by their bones. Your fellow academy-mates barely even know you exist, but you know all of their birds better than they ever will.

You stroke the nape of the chocobo you've been allowed to jockey today.

'No one owns you but you,' you whisper into her ear. 'And _you_ own the wind.' You tense up in anticipation of the starter's gun. 'Fly for me,' you murmur to your friend, not caring that there are no bright lights, no photographers, no podiums to scale. She chirps beneath you. ' _Fly_.'

You both go, and show the big city what you can do.


End file.
